Killing in the Slums: Social Order, Criminal Governance, and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro. (R&R at the American Political Science Review) State interventions against drug traﬃcking organizations (DTOs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this paper oﬀers a theory about diﬀerent social order dynamics among ﬁve types of criminal regimes – Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Anarchic. These diﬀer according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors; predate or cooperate with the community; and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival DTOs. Police interventions in these criminal orders pose diﬀerent challenges and are associated with markedly diﬀerent local security outcomes. Evidence for the theory is provided by the use a multi-method research design combining quasiexperimental statistical analyses, extensive qualitative research and a large N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the slums from organized criminal groups. (with Beatriz Magaloni and Vanessa Melo).

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Justice as Checks an Balances: Indigenous Claims in the Courts of Colonial Mexico. (Under review) Why do colonial rulers decide to protect Indigenous populations? Despite being a fundamental element of colonial governance, existing research in political science and political economy has overlooked how these regimes managed Indigenous grievances. Drawing on the economics of law literature this paper introduces a theory to understand the existence of a judicial system designed to process Indigenous claims. The main prediction is that a colonial power would protect Indigenous populations strategically in order to keep local elites in check. I support my predictions with a mixed-method approach and evidence from colonial Mexico. I rely on transcriptions of claims, and a novel dataset from nearly 30,000 claims sent to the General Indian Court from 1592 to 1820. Using text analysis techniques, I find that the decisions of the court are consistent with a theory of strategic judicial protection. Indians were more likely to win court cases when their local population was under decline, when settler elites were powerful, and when their claims did not challenge the power the central state. These results have implications for our understanding of both the development of Indigenous legal autonomy in colonial history and for the more general strategic development of judicial power in autocracies.

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Colonial Rule, Local Governance and Development: Evidence from Tlaxcala, Mexico. (APSA 2016, MPSA 2016, LASA 2017) In this paper, I investigate the effects of political autonomy as a byproduct of early colonial alliances. Specifically, I study the case of Tlaxcala, Mexico. This province enjoyed unique privileges as a result of its alliance with the Spaniards during the conquest. I test the effects of Tlaxcalan colonial institutions using a geographic regression discontinuity approach with data from 1930, 1940 and 2010.

Measuring Civilan-Criminal Cooperation and Trust in the Police with Anonymous Calls from Rio de Janeiro. (APSA 2017) Police corruption and improper use of force are pressing problems in developing countries. Measuring the true prevalence of these problems raises some empirical issues since they are commonly subject to underreporting due to citizen’ mistrust in authorities. To overcome these challenges, in this paper I use a unique dataset of anonymous reports collected in Rio de Janeiro by the crime hot-line Disque-Denuncia (DD).

Projects in Progess

From Indios to Citizens: the Unintended Effects of Liberalism in Latin America. In this project I explore the transition from colonies to independent republics in Latin America. In particular, I focus on how Indigenous lands and their local governments (formely protected by the Crown) were captured by the new economic and political elite.

The Historical Roots of Social Capital and Community Governance: A Survey Experiment in the Former Indigenous Republics of Rural Mexico. Social norms determine patterns of conflict and cooperation within and between communities. In this project, I explore the nature of such norms and their outcomes using historical allocation of institutions and survey experiments. (See EGAP pre-registration materials)

Private Provision of Public Goods: The Case of School Fees in Public Schools. (with Aala Abdelgadir). In several developing countries public education is supposedly free of charge. However, public schools often collect extra fees from parents. We explore the causes and consequences of these fees using quantitative and qualitative evidence from Mexico and Uganda.

Gang Recruitment and the Reversal of Gender Gap in Education: Evidence from Mexican Schools. (with Cesángari Lopez) In some countries girls often have lower drop-out rates and oftern perform better in school than boys. Using data from Mexico we study an alternative explanation for this reversal. In particular, we examine the effect of gang recruitment in schools as a consequece of demand for labor from drug cartels.

The Political Economy of Talent: An Analysis of High Performing Students in PISA from a Comparative Perspective. (with Blanca Heredia). High skilled students are rarely identified in time to make the most of their potential. Few countries have implemented effective policies to identify those students at an early age and provide them with an adequate educational environment. In this paper, we provide a quantitative exploration of the individual, environmental and school factors that explain high scores in PISA as a proxy for talent.